The Runaway
by Veracities
Summary: It was bound to happen one of these days. One of the hundreds of lovely sacrifices Hidan was making had to be as smart as him.


_The Runaway_

It was bound to happen one of these days. One of the hundreds of lovely sacrifices he was making had to be as smart as him. After all, his intelligence was only three out of five in the bingo book, one and a half lower than his partner's to his angry dismay.

He finds the pesky quality in one of his usual: a skinny, dark-haired beauty with daggers for eyes. They pierce into him as he checks her out. He finds her stare cathartic.

He's steering further away from the wanton blondes and vivacious redheads these days, driven by some inexplicable urge to find new prey, test new boundaries.

He should have known such an urge would be irreconcilable with his faith. Jashinism, or worship of the god who asked for murder as proof of faith. Murder becomes commonplace, normal under those conditions. Change becomes alien.

But instead of being cautious, Hidan goes the old route and lures her to his bed. And then proceeds to gut her throat—well, er, _attempts_ to gut her throat, because, you see, she doesn't let him.

She holds the scythe away from her ("Holy shit, _you_ can lift that thing too?") and yells at him ("I ran away from home; I have nowhere left to go, so I followed your invitation and you try to kill me?") and panicked and confused ('cause holy shit, this has _never_ happened to me before) Hidan tries to explain to her his religion. Because that always helps.

She listens and nods (_wait, wait_ listens _and_ nods?) as he explains the complicated rituals and shit (such as _celibacy_) that he's gotta do for Jashin-sama because fuck, Jashin-sama can send you to hell if he goddamn wants to, obviously. And then she asks with excitement, and I'm going to repeat this twice because I still can't really comprehend this: "Can I join?"

_Can I join?_

And suddenly Hidan is staring at this skinny little girl with his mouth gaping open because he too can't really comprehend the fucking words that just came out of her mouth. Because no one has ever said that before.

_Well._

"Fuck. Yes." He says, and he smiles with all his teeth and it feels like the expression really means something for once. _I fucking can't believe this_, he thinks, _I actually made a convert._

And soon, she's meeting up with him secretly—

Wait, they're not living together?

Well, you couldn't have expected Kakuzu to put up with her. He _is_ Kakuzu, you know.

Huh.

And soon, she's meeting up with secretly and they have these fun little blood orgies—okay, not really orgies, because of the celibacy, but you know what I mean; fanatically staring at the blood of sacrifices and then cutting yourself over it.

The one thing Hidan is a little sorry over is the fact that she's not immortal. Nor will ever be, given the rarity of his condition.

But she's happy. Turned out she was a missing nin who hated her village and had just enough prodigy in her to want to make it on her own. Even if her initial vision of making it on her own hadn't been this, this is pretty amazing.

Until the day that he's not there. She's waiting for him, having brought an older man, couldn't be younger than fifty, with beer breath, fresh from a local bar, slathered in blood, but Hidan doesn't show. With her luck, it starts to rain and the blood is sopping at her feet and she drops the corpse onto the ground with a sigh.

_He's…gone, isn't he? _

She's the first to admit that she wasn't doing all the rituals and shit because she _believed_ in Jashin-sama. No, that would've been Hidan. He was the true believer. She was just following along and doing it for his sake, she guessed. Because being around him was _interesting_.

When two hours have elapsed and Hidan still isn't there, she's hit by two strong emotions: pain and relief. Relief because she doesn't have to keep slaughtering people and pain because she doesn't have to anymore.

Maybe, killing had been a kind of a safety. If she fooled herself into believing, same as him, that the god out there wanted people dead in his name, then life had a purpose.

Without that foolery, there's nothing. Just endless, mindless existence.

As she reasons all of this to herself, she realizes that she's crying. Crying for the strange pale man whose heart had always been satisfied by his religion.

Two weeks later, the rumors spread to her part of town. The village of the leaves, they've killed two of the missing nin: Hidan and Kakuzu.

All she can do is throw her head up to sky and stare.

**~fin.**

12/31/11


End file.
